New Report: "Print Management at 'Mega-scale': A Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America"

New Report: "Print Management at 'Mega-scale': A Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America"

17 July 2012

This report provides insight into the characteristics of regionally consolidated print collections, key relationships across these collections, and their implications for system-wide issues such as information access, mass digitization, resource sharing, and preservation of library resources.

Written by OCLC Researchers Brian Lavoie, Constance Malpas and JD Shipengrover, Print Management at "Mega-scale": A Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America combines urbanist Richard Florida's mega-regions concept with WorldCat data to construct twelve regionally consolidated print book collections. The analysis of the regional collections is synthesized into a set of stylized facts describing their salient characteristics, as well as key cross-regional relationships among the collections. The stylized facts motivate a number of key implications regarding access, management, preservation, and other topics considered in the context of a network of regionally consolidated print book collections. The report also presents a simple framework to organize the landscape of print book collection consolidation models, as well as to clarify and distinguish basic assumptions regarding print consolidation. Print Management at "Mega-scale" provides a unique perspective on the new geography of library service provision, in which services and collections are increasingly organized "above the institution."

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